Tagged: Barnard - Adam Lundie - Eatons Hill Observatory

Adjacent to the bright blue supergiant star Alnitak shines the ionised hydrogen of the Flame and Horsehead nebulae.

Almost everyone has a go at imaging the Trifid nebula, which is composed of 3 different type of nebulae; emission, reflection, and absorption. When I noticed some faint red glow in the background, I decided to try integrating some long hydrogen emission line frames to see if I could get any structure out of it. I'm quite happy with the resulting background structures!

The dark molecular clouds of Barnard 92 (center) and 93 (left) are superimposed over the Messier 24 Sagittarius Star Cloud.

The Snake Nebula (also known as Barnard 72) is a small but S-shaped dust lane that snakes out in front of the Milky Way star clouds.

Next to the Lagoon Nebula, there lies the often overlooked collection of absorption, reflection and emission nebulae: NGC 6559, IC 1274, IC 1275, IC 4684, IC 4685, Barnard 303, LDN 227, LDN 213, and planetary nebula PN M 1-41.

After switching from a Celestron CGEM DX to a Skywatcher EQ8 Pro, and from off-axis guiding to on-axis guiding I am very happy with the results. This is a 25 minute test shot of the Horsehead Nebula.

I decided to take advantage of the only clear night for over a week to play with some new toys: an Astronomik 6nm Hα filter, and a Starlight Xpress adaptive optics unit. After learning how to calibrate and use the AO, I settled on the Horsehead Nebula as my target.

I have only a few nights experience with astrophography, so while I wait for my new camera, I'm using my wife's full frame DSLR. Since it's not so sensitive to emission nebula, I thought I'd try a dark nebula.

Often I like to see how an image is processed from start to finished. Presented in this animation are the main processing steps in sequence from my image of the Horsehead Nebula